After spending $200 on losing scratch-off lottery tickets, Chris Allison leaned against the wall of AK’s Kwik Stop. One scuffed black sneaker propped him up against a row of Amazon lockers. An unlit cigarette dangled from his hand.
“I am a degenerate gambler,” he said. “I will admit what I do.”
The Gainesville convenience store, which Allison frequents on his way home from work as a Walmart manager, sold more than $860,000 in scratch-offs last year, Florida Lottery data show. Signs advertising the lottery cover every window and post outside, and discarded tickets help fill the large black trash can near the door.
Located in an area with a median household income lower than the county average, the store encapsulates the results of a analysis conducted on a decade of sales data obtained from the Florida Lottery: Low-income people spend a larger share of their income on lottery tickets than residents of affluent areas.
It’s a longstanding claim, reiterated by academic papers, news articles and lottery watchdogs for decades.
The amount of money people spend on lottery tickets despite lacking financial security is “crazy,” said Greg Pasadas, an Orlando resident who has played scratch-offs for about eight years.
“They will go in, spend $250 on scratch-offs, and then they won’t buy food,” he said.
Pasadas makes his living posting videos of himself scratching off tickets to an audience of 51,000 subscribers on his YouTube channel, Scratch Life.
“It's for instant gratification,” he said. “It's the, ‘What if? What if it happens today?’”
For months, Fresh Take Florida reporters asked to interview Florida Lottery officials for this story and others.
They declined, saying they didn’t have staff available.
In an emailed statement, spokeswoman Alecia Collins said the lottery does not track individual player behavior and noted that the lottery has given more than $50 million to educational programs in Florida.
Scratching away residents’ income
On a Wednesday afternoon, a slow trickle of people entered AK’s, many still wearing their work uniforms, some emerging with fistfuls of colorful scratch-off tickets. Signs advertising e-cigarettes flashed slowly as a neon green poster encouraged visitors to “PAY BILLS HERE.”
The northwest Gainesville neighborhood where the store is located saw the third-highest scratch-off sales, both overall and relative to income, among roughly 60 census tracts in Alachua County last year.
Census tracts are neighborhood-size boundaries the federal government uses to measure population changes.
The median household income near AK’s is about $50,600, some 20% less than the county’s median.
Allison sees lottery retailers cluster in lower-income areas, he said.
“That's what the government wants; they want people gambling,” he said. “You see it, there's all these little advertisements right here — boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.”
With each “boom,” he pointed to another promotional poster drowning the store’s exterior with pictures of dollar signs and pink flamingos, a common image on lottery material.
Unlike others who frequent the convenience store, Allison is not living paycheck to paycheck, he said. But he’s seen gambling addictions take tolls on people who don’t share his financial security.
To better understand where people buy scratch-off tickets, a Fresh Take Florida reporter started with ticket sales data for more than 24,000 stores that sold lottery tickets in Florida from 2015 through 2025.
The reporter mapped the stores and added demographic, income and educational data at the county and census tract levels.
Here’s what Fresh Take Florida found:
- The median household income for areas with at least one licensed lottery retailer was about $76,000, roughly 19% less than neighborhoods without a store that sells lottery tickets.
- In neighborhoods that have lottery retailers, residents in richer areas spend a smaller share of their income on tickets.
- Residents in richer counties also spend a smaller share of income on lottery tickets. In many lower-income counties, residents spend two to five times more of their income on scratch-off tickets than those in the state’s wealthiest counties.
- Education levels are also correlated with sales. A 10-point increase in high school graduation rates — from 70% to 80%, for example — resulted in residents spending about one-third less of their paycheck on lottery tickets.
The analysis does not account for the fact that some people buy lottery tickets outside their areas of residence. A similar study, conducted by Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at the University of Maryland in 2022, found lottery retail customers are mostly local.
Rob Kohler, a former Texas Lottery employee and gambling opponent, said people with less tend to buy more tickets.
“The industry tries to hide it, but these sales come from … areas where public assistance is high,” Kohler said. “Education levels are low and income levels are low.”
Rural counties spend more
Since state lotteries began spreading across the U.S., including to Florida, in the mid-1980s, advocates have criticized them as a regressive way to raise revenue. Low-income earners, critics say, have more to gain by playing, so they spend a greater proportion of their income on tickets.
Rachel Volberg, a retired professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who has studied gambling since 1985, said it’s “quite rational” why low-income people play the lottery.
“Winning a large jackpot through the lottery is one of the very few ways that people with lower income have to dramatically change their economic circumstances,” she said.
The trend of higher lottery spending in low-income areas holds up beyond neighborhoods, extending to county-to-county comparisons, Fresh Take Florida found.
Of the 20 counties in Florida with the highest lottery spending relative to income, most are located in the Panhandle, and all but one are designated as rural, according to the 2020 Census.
Residents of richer counties, meanwhile, spend a smaller share of their income on lottery tickets.
The counties where St. Augustine and Naples are located, for example, both rank among the top three counties in the state for highest median household income. They’re also the two counties with the lowest proportional scratch-off sales.
By contrast, Jackson County has the highest scratch-off sales compared to income. Its median household income is the sixth-lowest in the state.
County-to-county comparisons leave less room for misinterpretation when it comes to sales trends, said Jonathan Cohen, who leads gambling policy at the American Institute for Boys and Men. Most people won’t travel from one county to another on a daily basis for work, to the extent that it would impact lottery sales, he said.
Just one in six Florida workers had a job outside their county of residence in 2022, according to the Florida Department of Transportation.
Education funding: who benefits?
Outside of median income, education also proved a strong predictor of lottery sales at both the county and tract level. The higher the percentage of people in an area with a high school degree or a bachelor’s degree, the lower the sales, Fresh Take Florida found.
The lottery has another connection to education. A portion of ticket sales fund K-12 programs and public university scholarships.
The earmark came about in the early 1980s, when Florida legislators first proposed establishing the lottery through a constitutional amendment. Tying the lottery to education revenue helped them gain enough favor to pass the amendment in 1986.
After lottery revenue came into the education budget, general revenue funding was reduced for education, according to a research paper published in Higher Education Politics & Economics. Eventually, the state created the Florida Bright Futures Scholarship, a program entirely funded by the lottery.
The merit-based scholarship covers up to 100% of state university tuition for high school students who meet certain academic criteria. It immediately found popularity with middle- and upper-class voters, many of whom had already planned to send their children to college and were saving for it, according to the research paper.
In a study, Ross Rubenstein, a Georgia State University professor, found low-income families were far less likely to benefit from the state’s HOPE Scholarship, Georgia’s equivalent to Florida’s the Bright Futures Scholarship.
The top beneficiaries of merit scholarships are students who go to college, specifically the highest-performing students who go to college, he said. Many of these families could probably afford tuition on their own.
“If you wanted to try and close gaps, you're not going to do a merit-based scholarship,” he said.
The Higher Education Politics & Economics paper found the percentage of disadvantaged students, referring to those who qualify for free or reduced-price lunches, in Florida high schools correlates negatively with the number of Bright Futures scholarships at the school. A school with 32% disadvantaged students can expect to see 152 Bright Futures recipients, while a school with 84% disadvantaged students is predicted to have just seven scholarship winners, researchers found.
Funneling lottery funds into merit-based scholarships bothers Jeff Allsup. But that doesn’t stop the 45-year-old night auditor from spending about $100 to $200 per week on tickets.
Standing outside the regional lottery office in Gainesville, where he drove from his home in The Villages to claim a $1,000 ticket, he reflected on how his own income plays into his scratch-off spending.
“Lotto is one of the only things that maybe, like, I can actually retire someday and have a big house and afford a family,” he said. “You know, it's a pipe dream, but it's a dream nonetheless.”
___
This story was produced by Fresh Take Florida, a news service of the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications. The reporter can be reached at thomaszoey@ufl.edu. You can donate to support our students here.